Search Engine Components That You Should Know
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Friday, September 22, 2006
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Understanding the search engine components and how they work is very important part of SEO. And those who think that SEO is all about learning some tricks and techniques to make your site rank well, are highly mistaken. Search Engines are always in the state of change as they have to keep up to the promise of providing relevant and updated content to users and also to keep a vigil eye on SEO experts who try to break the rules to rank high. So understanding the logic behind a search engine's working becomes all the more important for SEOs if they want to remain in touch with the changing rules of search engines.

Things would be much more easier to understand if we treat the search engines as living entities having an anatomy of their own just like a human body. They too have different parts or components that serve different functions to store, index, and then display websites to searchers. The datacenters where these search engines are placed are one of their important components.

The links from the engine itself are another important component as they take us wherever we want to go in the engine and also help us retrieve information. Then comes the spiders/crawlers or the 0s and 1s sent out by search engines to the internet to fetch documents, scanning and retrieving information in the form of fiber optic connections, thus visiting all the paths and directions.

The core function of the search engines is to crawl and index the sites. They know a number of different methods for storing, presenting, prioritizing data. When the search engine spiders are crawling the web, they are collecting the stores of existing data and sending it back to the datacenters where the information is processed through existing algorithms and spam filters. It is there that the website will get a ranking on the basis of the search engine's understanding of the way the Internet and the information contained in it works.

The search engine learns from it's own workings and the workings of the Internet functions in order to ensure that the new document types and technologies are able to be read and the algorithms are changed according to the new understandings of the functionality of the Internet. Not only this, detecting and penalizing spam is also one of the components of search engines.

Understanding how the search engines work, what are their components and what are their long term goals can help you optimize your website in the best possible way without employing tricks and techniques that do not gel with the long-term goals of SEOs. In other words, understand the fact that search engines are ever evolving and dynamic entities that keep updating themselves and their rules. And because they have the capability to "learn", in case you use any unethical means and tactics, eventually they will learn of them.